Hardware Today: Choosing a RAID Controller Page 2

Internal host based RAID technology is divided into two camps: Serial ATA (SATA) and SCSI. Choosing between them involves a trade off of speed vs. price: SCSI is faster, but more expensive. "From a price perspective, the delta between SCSI and SATA drives is over 5x for a comparably sized drive," Barbara Murphy, vice president of marketing for Applied Micro Circuits Corp.'s storage business unit, told ServerWatch.

Frugality has its limits though. "We would not suggest that you put a Serial ATA disk in a situation where it's a highly transaction-oriented, high-performance critical application environment," Cox said. However, "as people get more experienced with Serial ATA technology, you're going to hear 'Whoa, holy cow, you know, I can buy this stuff a lot cheaper.'"

This may be bad news to vendors, as SCSI and Fibre channel drives carry a higher gross margin than do ATA drives, Cox said, adding they, "would have to sell a lot more units, in order to keep their revenue up and, more importantly, to keep their gross margin up."

Another player in the SATA market is Intel. In early 2003, Intel began selling a four-port SRCS14L controller. The product tightly integrates the RAID controller with the server architecture. "So instead of just saying, Go and shop for the motherboard and for the RAID card that suits your needs, and then, it's up to you to make sure that it all works together, we say, if it's on our list as a validated combination, then you can be very confident that it's a robust solution," Steve Fingerhut, Intel product line manager for volume products marketing, told ServerWatch.

The adoption of the speedier SATA II standard may bring another ball to SATA's court. "SATA will [occupy] a stronger market position as SATA II features arrive," Luca Bert, director of product & programs management, RAID storage adapters for LSI Logic, said. "With [features] such as native command queuing, enclosure management, and port multiplier support, SATA II will be a viable solution for an enterprise-level server, especially in the cost sensitive segment."

External Host Based

The other type of host based RAID isn't really RAID at all. External host based offerings are commonly described as "just a bunch of disks," or JBOD enclosures. A JBOD system is not configured as a RAID set up, and therefore we have elected to not cover any JBOD offerings for this piece. For those interested in learning more, the DF2000J from LSI Logic and theFS4100 Fibre to SATA JBOD from Adaptec are two JBOD products worthy of an initial look.

External Controller Based

Meanwhile, on the external controller based front, iSCSI, a flexibly routed storage technology, is getting noticed and garnering market share. Fibre channel currently dominates this space, however. To date, Network Appliance is the lone player in the iSCSI arena. "The problem that iSCSI currently is encountering is that Fibre channel's not standing still," Cox said, "they're bringing the price differential down on Fibre channel host adapters and switches to a point where iSCSI's losing some of its value proposition in terms of cost." Cox sees value in iSCSI despite its slower speed, "to me the primary value proposition of iSCSI, until it gets to be 10 gigabit, will be interoperability."

One external controller based product banking on this interoperability is Digi-Data's STORM family of RAID controllers. STORM Digi-Data CEO Bill Tomeo pins STORM's modular architecture as its main strength. "The STORM controllers house eight completely independent channels in one box," Tomeo said. "Each 1U box has eight independent Fibre channels on it, so what we've done is eliminate the catastrophic failures that can occur in a back plane." Controllers typically have controller boards that share a common back plane, which presents a problem should a catastrophic failure occur, he explained.

With five types of RAID controllers and countless vendors peddling their wares, what's an enterprise to do? Bert sums up customer considerations best: Ultimately, "the choices of ATA/SATA, SCSI, or Fibre solutions will depend on the desired trade off between performance, connectivity, reliability, scalability, capacity, and cost."